In the aftermath of an armed conflict in Africa, the international community both produces and demands from local partners a variety of blueprints on how to reconstruct state and society. The aim is to re-formalize the state after what is viewed as a brief or extended period of fragmentation and informalization caused by armed conflict. In reality, both African economies and politics are very much informal in character, with informal actors (including so-called "Big Men") often using their positions in the formal structure as a means to reach informal goals. Through a variety of in-depth case studies - from DRC to Somali to Liberia among others - this book shows how important informal political and economic networks are in many of the continent's conflict areas. More than this, it demonstrated that without a proper understanding of their impacts in areas such as borderlands and in "narco-states" such as Guinne-Bissau, attempts to "formalize" African states, particularly those emerging from wars, will be in vain.

What makes young men willing to risk their lives by enrolling in violent organizations? How do these organizations persuade young men to do so? In the age of radicalization, these questions are central to most debates about politics and globalisation. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork in various conflict settings, this volume explores both the violent organizations that entice young people to engage in conflict and how these same young people answer the call. It takes the reader into the worlds of Maoists in Nepal; ex-combatants, mercenaries, religious zealots and drug dealers in West Africa; violent student politics in Bangladesh; ethno-nationalist vigilante groups in Kenya; both sides of the war between LRA and the Ugandan state as well as ganglike fraternities in the Philippines. Instead of focusing on either socio-economic, ideological or psychological explanations for mobilization and radicalization, the contributors illustrate the way that these concerns co-exist in situated and embedded ways. It argues that we should not presume to know what triggers such current turns to violence, but that the meaning behind them should be uncovered ethnographically. The book thus unearths the gendered and generational tensions at play; the underlying concerns about the future; and the conviction and concern involved discrediting the udnerstanding of mobilization as a one-way journey to violence and radicalization. When researched in situ and indepth, mobilization shows itself to be multiple, performative and temporary, just as people may show themselves to be more sporadically radical than formerly presumed.

In the aftermath of an armed conflict in Africa, the international community both produces and demands from local partners a variety of blueprints on how to reconstruct state and society. The aim is to re-formalize the state after what is viewed as a brief or extended period of fragmentation and informalization caused by armed conflict. In reality, both African economies and politics are very much informal in character, with informal actors (including so-called "Big Men") often using their positions in the formal structure as a means to reach informal goals. Through a variety of in-depth case studies - from DRC to Somali to Liberia among others - this book shows how important informal political and economic networks are in many of the continent's conflict areas. More than this, it demonstrated that without a proper understanding of their impacts in areas such as borderlands and in "narco-states" such as Guinne-Bissau, attempts to "formalize" African states, particularly those emerging from wars, will be in vain.